#AskGaryVee Episode 189: Employee Poaching, Nervousness & YouTube Influencers

“no to good things so you
can say yes to great things?” – You know Kyle, you’re talking about decision making and time management and opportunity costs is
a tremendous question. Who gets to decide what is good or great? Is first and foremost. What may be good to me may not be great to you. For me if I can meet Ric Flair for dinner that would be great, for India, are you excited about having
dinner with Ric Flair? – Yeah, totally. – Do you know who Ric Flair is?
– No. – Exactly. Now name one
of your favorite bands. – I don’t know. You know who
I really had dinner with? Jeff Bridges. – I don’t know who that is, the actor?
– Yeah. – I know who that is. Give me a band that you love right now. – A band that I love right now? – Follow me here. – This is really scary. – Just say it, stop being scared. Some random. – Grimes. Grimes. – Good, I don’t know
anything about Grimes. I never heard of Grimes. And you’d be like, Hey the lead singer of
Grimes, it’s a singer? E-mailed right now and said,
“I want to have dinner” I’d be like, delete, like
I don’t even know, right? And so who gets to decide
what is good and great and that’s why I’m answering this question with that little skit. Which is you don’t know until you do it. And so, Kyle. Kyle, too many people
crippled by this question. And I’m going to get
serious now for a second. You won’t know if something is good or great until
it actually happens. Some of the greatest things that ever happened to me in business
look terrible on paper. Wasn’t somebody fancy,
wasn’t fancy, you know? It just was kind of like, oh wait, and then that person knew
and then I connected them. Meeting Blaine Cook, the original CTO of Twitter for a taco
at South by Southwest on the dawn of South
by Southwest this week. That didn’t look like one of the greatest meetings of my life, but it turned into one of the greatest meetings of my life. This happens all the time. Too many people are crippled by the right hire, by the right meeting. I say work harder, work more efficient, make more 15 and 30 minute meetings that leave you more
time to do more things. And create more opportunities and don’t be crippled by choosing the right opportunities or not. So the answer is, nobody
can answer that for you. Normally you can’t answer it upfront. I did a bunch of podcasts that I never heard of the people before. And I think some of them
have been paying dividends. And I did a podcast
with Shaq that is going to air shortly. On paper it looks like Shaq is a greater thing than good. But I think we’re going
to sell more books, from some of that good because I didn’t realize the
audience that person had. Be more efficient with what you do to allow you to do more things. Then you don’t have to worry about the subjective and non controllable like knowing what’s good or great. That’s the recap.

– [Voiceover] Nathanial asks, “Gary, you’ve said YouTube,
Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, “and Instagram are the big players. “What’s your opinion on Vine?” – I think Vine has taken a secondary spot. I still think there’s
a real community there. I think Instagram and Snapchat took a lot of those Vine celebrities. There’s still plenty of
stuff going on there, I’m spending less time on there. It’s now in the niche and young category. I look for mass and older category. That’s where I’m betting on those things that I brought up. So I think that Vine has a place. As I’m talking right
now I’m going to look up where Vine is in the
rating system right now in the app store. Which is always a great
indicator on where things are. But to me, I would rather pay attention to what’s
going on MusicAlly right now. By the way Snapchat is number one in social networks, three games, then Snapchat, then Facebook messenger, then Facebook, then
Instagram, then YouTube, the next thing that pops
up is Pinterest at 18. Which is interesting. What’s App at 21. MusicAlly at 25, Twitter at 27. Look at that, MusicAlly above Twitter. And I keep pushing MusicAlly and everyone is like, ehhh. Kik, very under the radar, very big with younger demo, that’s 34. As of this moment. There’s that Wish app that
I’ve been telling people about. Periscope at 49, real player there, right. Here we go, here we go,
here we go, here we go. Tinder at 75. No Vine yet by the way. And Vine has been slipping. and I feel like Vine’s been, Tumblr is at 108. You know I’ve been down on that. GroupMe at 122, LinkedIn at 140. No Vine. And so that’s, that’s kind
of how I feel about it. Just looking, triple checking here, maybe I missed it, because
that could be the case. No Vine. So let’s go to categories real quick. So I look at data, and I go by vibe and right now in social networks, Vine is– Is it even categorizing in this? I got to find it. It can’t be this low. I don’t even know where it is right now. I don’t know, anyway, that’s how I think of it, India.
That’s the bottom line. Cool. Go ahead. – [India] Video from Benjamin.

Go ahead, play it. – Hey Gary, Benjamin Holmgreen here. You said you wanted some more interesting videos for the show so I
went by this busy street in the big city and
wanted to ask a question. The question is, how do you
feel about employee poaching? Taking employees from
someone elses company and bringing them to work for you, good, bad, or indifferent? Thanks Gary. – I think this is a very
easy question to answer. I think people hire from other people’s companies all the time. This isn’t nursery school, this is business. And if you can steal somebody from another competitor or another company that you think brings
benefit to your company and you’ve got recruiters. I mean, we have, seven, nine,
10 full time recruiters here at the VaynerMedia. They’re just pounding, hitting it, and trying to find the
right people for us. So I think in big
business, this is just part of the equation. Poaching? Poaching makes it seem bad. You mean employee recruitment? You guys, I’m sure you’re getting e-mails from recruiters, from
LinkedIn all the time. And it happens all the time. That’s why I try to build a really, I’m very proud of our turnover. Voluntary turnover here is incredibly low, and that means we’re building culture, people are going to
believe in me as a CEO, believe in Vayner, and so you need to focus on building a good business so that people are unpoachable as you say. But I think that’s common practice, I don’t think there’s anything. If there are shady practices where people are under contract, but normal every day recruiters trying
to find people for jobs. That’s like asking, what do you think about having an accounting department? Or what do you think about having an office for your business. That’s table stakes, that’s oxygen. That’s normal business behavior. So I think you’re eluding to something that I guess lends itself, I love how you how
you hacked the video. I guess it’s lending itself to like, Hey you stole my developer
or you stole my CTO well build a great product so that nobody is stealable. Build a great culture,
so nobody is stealable. I don’t own India. This is voluntary. Build something great that
people want to be a part of. You want to be a part of this, India? – Yeah.

“nervous is a good thing,
do you agree or disagree? “Do you ever get nervous?” – Sure I get nervous. I mean, everybody gets nervous. I get nervous not that often. Because I’m not putting myself in nervous positions anymore. I don’t have to feel nervous about hitting on a girl anymore. I don’t jump out of planes, that would make me very nervous. Trying to think of the
last time I was nervous. Maybe a heights thing, even that I’ve gotten better about. Did I see like a snake that scared me? I think I saw a snake somewhere, a big snake. I’ll tell you what makes me nervous, I don’t know if it’s nervous, when I see Xander almost falling and almost hitting his head on a rock. Is that nervous, or am I scared, what is that? – I think that moment
that you see him fall you get nervous. – A consistent nervousness. I don’t get nervous
before I speak or do TV. – You’re not always
nervous about kid stuff. – Right right. Nervous is a trait,
people should get nervous. I believe that you do not get nervous. I get a weird nervous energy before I speak or go on TV. But I’m not nervous, I’m so jazzed up that I feel like insane. So it’s like a cousin
of nervous, that moment. I feel like, if you were
a competitor you’re just going to get that feeling. Like I’m not really nervous when we’re shooting five on five. I’m thinking, I really want, I really hope that AJ is on my team because I might get nervous that I’m going to get into a fight today. If we’re on opposite teams. I don’t tend to get nervous, and I think if you’re,
this is a business show, so if you’re asking about, I think being nervous in
a business environment is a bad sign, I do. I do think that it means
you’re not prepared, it means you don’t have it yet. That it factor. I do think you have interesting energy. Nervous energy. But like flat out nervous I think is a tell you
don’t have A-list stuff. That being said, some of you may be nervous and crush it every time I have a little bit of that. I don’t want to call it
nervous because it’s not. It’s adrenaline. But I don’t think nervous is bad, I don’t think any emotion is bad. I think it’s human. Fear. Look do I think like, anger or cynicism are there things I don’t appreciate, or things that I think are a
waste of good energy, sure. But I don’t think any of them are bad. They’re just natural.
We’re all human. We all got our stuff, you know? That was it? That was the show.

– Hey Gary
– Father and son. We have a YouTube channel where we teach people how to
make signs like this. Got over 300 videos. We post 6 videos a week. The name may sound familiar because I got ten signed books from
you on the super eight. About 25 minutes in. You pulled my name and almost
threw it back in the bin but thank you for not. I appreciate that. Thank you for all you do. Our question to you is, We’re all over facebook,
we post to facebook six times a week, and I’m using facebook darkpost so we’re getting really
good reaction there. But we want to grow our brand,
we want to grow our name, grow our audience, what
platform do you think is best to go to next? Our demographic is
somewhere between 45 to 65 years old and woodworkers, obviously people that are interested in woodworking. So you can tell me, tell
us, the next platform that we should go into. That’s really what we’re looking for. Appreciate your time, Gary. Thanks for all the great
stuff, love you man. We’ll see you later.
– Bye Gary. – Bye. – Bye Gary, that was so awesome. That was awesome. What are their names again? – [India] Dave and Eric. – Look, I think when I was looking, India saw me, I was looking
at your YouTube data. Kind of making some assumptions
on your facebook data. I think that everybody, this is great, this is a great question
because I can answer for so many of you. Everybody is looking for the next thing before they’ve really won the last thing. I think there’s a lot of
work to be done, guys. On your, let me give you
a huge piece of advice. I would make those signs. You should, here’s what
I’d like you to do. I’m going to give some real
tangible advice right now. – There’s their channel. – There’s their channel, so
Dave what I’d like you to do is I’d like you to make
these amazing signs for 50 to 100 influencers on YouTube. I want you to make these amazing signs for 50 to 100 of these other
YouTube influences. Look at what you did here, and you just got exposure on a bigger YouTube channel
by asking this question. You’re hacking. I would actually rather you cut down from six episodes a week to three. And take all that energy and time and e-mail out, search here for whatever, the genre you think your world is, and reach out to all these other hundreds of thousands of YouTube providers that are producing great content that might be in your demo. And don’t go from Michell Phan,
with a billion people, go to people that have
100,000 subscribers, 200,000 subscribers, they
haven’t made it big yet, and reach out and say, “Look I’d love to make a sign for your “around your logo for your YouTube show.” They’d be pumped because
this looks incred– I mean these guys are
clearly good at what they do. And so what you need
to do is more collabo. The real thing that people
are missing is collabo. Like, there’s a lot, if I was on DJ Khaled’s
Snapchat right now, I’d be like, big shout
out to my boy Gary Vee. That’s another channel, I would grow 100,000, 200,000 followers in a heartbeat. Ads are great and you
should definitely do them but collabo, collaborations for all of you at home are
very very very important. And I think you are actually making stuff, so you can bring something, a real hand craft work. A bunch of people are going to forget you guys, I don’t care cowboy. But one out of every 50
people that you e-mail is going to say “That’s
cool, I want that.” Then they’re going to give you a shoutout to their 200,000 person, again, cowboy show, sign show, or just kids, it could be anything. And that is going to
get you much better ROI. I would cut down the
shows from six to three, this is actually tremendous advice for so many people. Cut down on the content creation and start working on distribution. Distribution my friends,
collabo and distro. That didn’t work. But collaborations and distribution. You need more awareness. What you did by getting on the show, by grabbing India’s heart was an absolute victory for you. Because there are
absolutely 50, 500 people who are watching right now that are going to subscribe to your channel. Follow you, buy a sign,
or whatever your KPI is. You need more distribution and awareness not more content, not the next platform. Facebook and Youtube is
exactly right for you guys. You just need to change your behavior to respect collaborations. Which are a gateway drug to distribution. You need more awareness within that ecosystem, that’s
what you need to be doing.